Links for 2011-06-06

“The modest idea of Bill and Scott Rasmussen–a failed hockey broadcaster and his college-dropout son–ESPN is now, according to James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, “the most important component of the Disney empire, worth more than the entire National Football League, worth more than the NBA, MLB, and the NHL put together.” It is also a relentlessly vacuous admixture of forced humor, sentimentality and petty corruption. There is of course no contradiction here, but if there is any surprise on offer in “Those Guys Have All the Fun,” an oral history of the network, it is just how deeply ESPN’s success is rooted in its awfulness.”

“Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics instructors have been charged with improving the performance and retention of students from diverse backgrounds. To date, programs that close the achievement gap between students from disadvantaged versus nondisadvantaged educational backgrounds have required extensive extramural funding. We show that a highly structured course design, based on daily and weekly practice with problem-solving, data analysis, and other higher-order cognitive skills, improved the performance of all students in a college-level introductory biology class and reduced the achievement gap between disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged students–without increased expenditures. These results support the Carnegie Hall hypothesis: Intensive practice, via active-learning exercises, has a disproportionate benefit for capable but poorly prepared students.”